Will Muschamp made no secret when he was hired to succeed Urban Meyer as Florida's head coach in December that his first act would be to dynamite the spread option attack that terrorized the SEC throughout Meyer's tenure in favor a "pro-style" system. Step one was hiring Charlie Weis from the pros as offensive coordinator. Step two: Convincing incumbent quarterback John Brantley to return for his fifth year after a disappointing debut in 2010. And step three: Ensuring that Brantley isn't the only viable option in the fall.With today's signature from Palm Beach Gardens (Fla.) quarterback Jacoby Brissett – a priority for the new staff, after initially turning down Meyer's offer to join next year's recruiting class as a grayshirt – the Gators added two of the most sought-after quarterback prospects in the country to push Brantley right away. The other, Jeff Driskel, is already on campus, with designs on Brantley's job in spring practice. Brissett (right) will arrive in Gainesville in the fall. Both can already match Brantley's NFL size – Driskel is listed at 6-3/220 pounds; Brissett at 6-5/225 – and recruiting hype, with (allegedly) better athleticism. Both are fresh faces for an offense making an obvious attempt at a fresh start.
But does either have a legitimate shot to force Brantley out of one of the most high=profile positions in the country as a true freshman? First of all, your answer probably depends more on your assessment of Brantley than on the viability of the noobs.
On one hand, Brantley isn't an up-and-coming underclassmen with years ahead of him after some initial growing pains. He was a fourth-year junior who showed almost none of the alleged promise that made him one of the most coveted quarterback prospects in the country coming out of high school. He can't run (73 positive rushing yards for the year, not including sacks, on a long gain of 12), he's not a great decision maker (his 118.8 efficiency rating was 10th in the SEC among regular starters) and his 400-caliber arm supplied almost no firepower to speak of. In fact, Brantley finished dead last in the conference in both yards per completion (10.4) and completions covering at least 25 yards (9).
Pound for pound, Brantley posed the meekest threat to defenses of any starting quarterback in the conference, and of any Florida QB of the post-Spurrier decades, by far. In four of their five games against opponents that finished the season in the top 25, the Gators scored six points on two field goals against Alabama, seven points against Mississippi State, 14 points (including a kickoff return for a touchdown) against South Carolina and seven points against Florida State; in the fifth, the offense put three TDs on the board against LSU only by virtue of a pair of short-field starts in the red zone following Tiger turnovers.
By November, the offense was at least as effective in sporadic appearances by either of two jack-of-all-trades freshmen, Trey Burton and Jordan Reed, who were shuttled in an effort to rekindle the Tebow magic as runners. From the perspective of the new staff, though, that might have been a symptom of the real problem – namely, that Brantley was shoehorned into a system designed for a more mobile quarterback, under a coordinator, Steve Addazio, who had somehow managed to rein in Tebow's big-play tendencies in 2009, too. Addazio refused to change horses in midstream, even after it was obvious that a) Brantley was a nonentity when it came to the "option" part of the spread option, and b) It was getting him killed. Brantley spent the entire second half of the season "banged up,", and never looked like he was comfortably in control of the offense.
At worst, the oversight of a respected dropback teacher like Weis could still do for Brantley what it did for Tennessee's Jonathan Crompton, who rebounded from a catastrophe of a season on first-year offensive coordinator Dave Clawson's watch in 2008 to become a viable, productive starter under Lane Kiffin in 2009. Applied to Brantley, the same rate of improvement Crompton showed from his junior to senior years would make Brantley one of the most feared slingers in the SEC.
For anything less than that, though, a full-fledged reclamation project on a fifth-senior – especially at a program that won't stand for many mulligans between championships – may not make sense if Driskel or Brissett can take the reins without leading the offense into total disaster. Certainly Brantley didn't come back to finish his career on the bench, but why spend a year on trying to make Brantley above average in his swan song if it can be spent instead on getting one of the hotshot freshmen up to speed for much greater returns down the line? How much rope is the new staff willing to give to damaged goods?
With Driskel already in the mix, we may know by the end of the spring: If it's Brantley going into the summer, it's almost certainly going to Brantley well into the season, at minimum. If the competition remains open into the summer, start your engines. Unlike last year, when he was essentially the only true quarterback on the roster, Brantley's pole position isn't likely to mean much once the race is underway.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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